This bill was going to allow District Court judgments to be published online just as the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court judgments are. But strangely Amy Adams has removed that clause.

One of the interesting features of the Judicature Modernisation Bill was that it would require (Clause 401) final judgments to be published online of District Courts. At present, only the judgments of the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court are published online as a matter of course – on Judicial Decisions Online. So this reform would mean District Court judgments would now be routinely published online. This would be great as it would lead to much more open justice.

As present you have to request release of a district court judgement from the Judge and provide reasons for your request. This is highly unsatisfactory. Courts should not be secret.

The whole point of setting up a trust is not only for protection of assets but also to create a living will. A trust, properly set up, can provide its beneficiaries with income long after the person who set it up has died.

The old-fashioned traditional way was to write a will. Traditionally, a will leaves the assets to family members and specifies how the assets should be divided. Wills are regularly contested in court, particularly if a parent does not divide the assets equally amongst the remaining children.

Even when the division of assets is equal, one sibling can still demand more than their “fair share”. I know this for a fact as it happened to a friend of mine. The unreasonable and selfish sibling in my friend’s case ended up getting the majority of the assets simply because they made it clear that they were prepared to spend years in court and cost the other siblings thousands of dollars, even if this meant that all the inheritance was used up.

Until I read this article I believed that setting up a trust was the best way to provide for my children after my death. The purpose of a trust, I believed, could not be overruled in court. If the trust stated clearly that the assets are not to be sold, but that the passive income was to be divided equally amongst the trust beneficiaries, I expected that it could not be contested. This latest case in the article below shows that a judge can overrule totally the wishes of the person who set up the trust. This is a terrible precedent. It makes me think that no matter how I structure my will or set up a trust any disgruntled relative can use the courts to override it.

A rare occasion when the champion of the criminal, the NZ Herald, actually takes the side of police, so it’s worth highlighting since it’s a rare slip up in their usual anti-authoritarian stance.

Statistics rule our world in many ways, but their value is surely taken too far when they tell us the rate of successful criminal prosecutions is too high. That is what the New Zealand Law Society said when Statistics New Zealand reported the conviction rate to be its highest in at least 35 years. Last year, 83.2 per cent of people charged in our courts were convicted. Prosecution success rates have risen in 10 of the past 11 years.

“It’s heading the wrong way,” said Law Society president Jonathan Temm. “Our level should be constantly around the 75 per cent mark. Anything over 80 per cent (means) people are pleading guilty to things that in the past they would not have been convicted of.”

Really? How was that figure pre-determined to be the benchmark of justice? It is reminiscent of school exams in the days of “scaling”. If much more than 50 per cent of pupils passed the qualification, it meant the exam was not hard enough.

In that event, the education authorities used to scale back all marks so only the desired proportion passed. If more pupils than usual had been smart enough, or had studied hard enough, to pass that year, well, tough luck for some of them. At least, there is no suggestion some of each year’s convictions should be quashed to reduce the rate to 75 per cent retrospective, but that is a small mercy. Why can we not simply celebrate a rising success rate for those who bring charges to court?

It shows clearly that Police are doing an excellent job at deciding what will succeed in front of a court and what will be a waste of time or is hopeful thinking. I, personally, can’t see any down-side to criminals being convicted at higher rates. All this against a backdrop of a reduction in over-all crime! Read more »

The Herald editorial looks at the comments from last week by Judith Collins on speeding up the justice system.

The time it can take for judges to issue a reserved decision is one of the enduring mysteries of the justice system. It can be many months, even a year or more, following a hearing at which the learned mind was presented with the salient issues. Litigants can only wonder what could be taking so long, and their lawyers can only advise patience. So it is refreshing to find a Minister of Justice mystified too.

Judith Collins, a lawyer herself, does not suffer from undue deference to the judiciary. Announcing a number of steps to improve the running of the courts, she has given notice that reserved judgments will need to be delivered faster. She says she is concerned at the time judges in some courts are taking and she is sick of hearing the solution is to appoint more judges. Read more »